


slowly let me drown

by piggy09



Series: the unforsaken road [2]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen, Helena warnings, I don't know if this counts as non-con but I am tagging it to be safe, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Sedation, Spoilers for S2E3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-04
Updated: 2014-05-04
Packaged: 2018-01-21 22:54:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1567010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mostly, Helena just wants to sleep. But. That isn’t an option, not here, not with Grace-fear and all these men looking at her like she is a thing to be devoured. Like she’s <i>meat</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	slowly let me drown

**Author's Note:**

> Why yes, my goal is to have a piece of Helena fanfiction for every episode where she is actually awake and saying things. Is there a problem with this? _Too bad._
> 
> Please leave kudos + comment if you enjoyed!

They call this girl “Grace,” and she is afraid. Helena can taste fear on her tongue, the copper of it, red as Grace’s hair; it is masked by the food that they gave Helena, though, and – food! It has been a while since she’s eaten. There have been longer whiles, but right now Helena’s body is one long scream of hunger and so she listens to it, and feeds it. The grapes are a sour ferment on her tongue, mixing with sleep-musk and leaving her mouth heavy. All of her is heavy and her heart is a sick lurching _thud_ in her chest.

Mostly, Helena just wants to sleep. But. That isn’t an option, not here, not with Grace-fear and all these men looking at her like she is a thing to be devoured. Like she’s _meat_.

You do not sleep until you are certain that it is safe. This is why Helena does not sleep, much. Not ever, and especially not now. She cannot be angry at herself for sleeping earlier, as her muscles knitted themselves together (God’s work), but now that she is awake she _refuses_ to succumb once more.

Instead she fills her belly and tells Grace about her sister to cut through the bitterness lingering on the roof of her mouth. The word _sestra_ is sweet on her tongue and if there is one thing Helena is always chasing – always, always chasing – it is sweetness.

Poor Grace. Helena knows fear, that hollowache. Her fear is at least an honest thing. These men who say _family_ , these interchangeable men with their interchangeable snake eyes, glittering…well. If there is one thing she is not lacking, it is fear. If there is another thing she is not lacking, it is family.

Although apparently Tomas has skittered off back to Europe. Like a _beetle_ , Helena thinks sourly, but decides not to think about that. Instead she will think about Sarah, who is better and brighter and – kinder.

_Not true_ , moans her body in the language of aches and pains, but Helena is very good at ignoring her body. Her heart, undamaged, sighs _Sarah_ with every beat.

(When she’d hugged Sarah Sarah’s heart had gone _pound pound pound_ on the same side. They are like mirrors, or pieces meant to be connected.)

_Goodbye, Tomas_ , she thinks, but what she says is: “Good riddance.” This is something Grace will not understand, just as she could not understand “I’ve already got a family.” Words are something Helena hoards easily as sugar packets (they took them from her) (she will find more) (there is time, and she has pushed hunger at bay for now) (they _took_ them) ( _hers_ ). Sometimes it is easier to use other people’s words than her own.

In this instance she will pretend her past self was another person; she pities that Helena, because she did not know what she was saying. _Good riddance_. It was neither of those things.

_Elizabeth Childs_.

That was a lie, too, although past-Helena did not know it. Her Sarah is very good at lying.

_I’ve already got a family._ But family is not something you can _choose_ , Helena knows, it is what you are _given_. Helena and Sarah are family! They are one, they are the same, they are two hearts beating the same thump-thump-thump in two separate chests and it makes Helena so angry that—

She breathes. In. Out.

Next to her, Grace is a stiff pillar of fear. Helena sometimes wears her fear like that. Usually it is more of an animal thing. If Helena had room in her heart to like people, maybe she would like Grace, this girl who is bad at lying.

Sarah and Kira push against her ribcage, though, thump-thump-thump, and there is no room for copper girls who are almost animals.

So she offers food, instead. Maybe it is an apology. Maybe it is an attempt to lure the animal in Grace out of hiding – make her attack Helena, attempt to smother her or lash out with words (like Sarah did) ( _she cares_ , says Helena’s heart, Helena’s untouched heart) (Helena’s heart is only untouched because Sarah did not know—). Maybe it is an apology, or a kindness.

Helena doesn’t care, much. She only knows that food is important, maybe more important than anything. The drumstick dangles between the two of them, glistening with fat and juice and what was once life.

Grace stumbles back and leaves.

_Well_. Well, well, well.

The flesh parts easily between Helena’s teeth. She has never denied being an animal.

* * *

Time passes, dripping like water from a faucet. For a while Helena’s muscles thrummed beneath her skin to send her walking again, but there is no van waiting for her and she does not know where Sarah is.

There is no van here, and no Tomas. Grace said Tomas ran off to the Dark Ages. Helena doesn’t know what those are, but in her head there was a picture of the ship, all dark and rusty, and the dark of the basement, and Helena thinks perhaps Grace means places that are dark and smell of fear. That is the sort of rat hole Tomas would run off to. He is that sort of rat. Helena can see a Tomas rat, and lazily she lets her eyes droop shut to give him a dark place to hide.

It is difficult for her to blink her eyes back open. Everything is an effort.

Tomas slipped back into the dark. Here it is bright bright. Everything has a halo of light around it, and Helena feels like this should make her angry, or possibly sad. The rings of light are all fuzzy, though; her eyes are blurring over, images shift-sliding around. It’s like when she stares too long through a sniper scope – she remembers Kat-ja Ob-in-ger’s red hair, the way it looked like a drop of blood against the lens.

She remembers Sarah, too, although at the time she was Elizabeth Childs. Silly past Helena.

The world is very fuzzy. Mostly, Helena just wants to sleep.

There is a reason she can’t sleep. There is a reason that she should stay awake here, in this bright room, but Helena’s treacherous body is pulling her down and her mind is a fuzzy light-halo.

_I am the light_ , she thinks blearily, filled with the insane urge to laugh, and then she sinks into the dark.

* * *

She has never liked sleeping very much. Sleep brings dreams, and dreams are strange and uncertain. Dreams are like walking through the roads in Italy, hunched in on yourself from the sting of the cold, and slipping on a patch of unseen ice; dreams are thinking Sarah is not going to pull the trigger.

Dreams, that is, are uncertain.

When Helena slept off her last wound from Sarah, she dreamed – well. She dreamed that they were friends.

Tonight maybe her body knows that she does not want to be alone. Not here, not in this strange place. In her daze she has lolled over to the side; her eyes flicker when she hears the door open.

_Hello,_ Sarah says.

Helena tries to say Hello back. She cannot quite manage it.

The bed doesn’t creak when Sarah sits on it. _That’s because I’m not real, meat-head_ , Sarah says, and it’s true that her voice is like the scraps of old meat between Helena’s teeth.

_Always meat_ , she thinks, dazed; her eyes have fallen closed again at some point and she considers the backs of her eyelids. Sarah called her meat, but did not mean it. No one here calls her meat but the world _miracle_ sounds more like _meat_ than _meathead_ does.

Helena’s mind, padded in cotton, helpfully supplies that she told Kira that Sarah wasn’t real. Another lie, from when she did not understand. Sarah was always more real than she was.

Except now. Now, if she concentrates, she can feel the remembered pressure of Sarah’s flesh against her own; she can pretend she smells that closet full of more shirts than Helena had ever seen.

It’s not true, though. Sarah isn’t here.

Stay _,_ she saysthinks. Please.

_’Course_ , Sarah says back. _You need me. I need you_.

When Sarah says it like that it sounds simple. Or maybe Helena is just too tired to understand the meaning in it.

Do you need me, she asks.

_Soon,_ Sarah says. Helena dreams Sarah’s hand up to her hair; she wants to shiver at the not-real touch of it, but her body is heavy as a corpse and won’t listen to her. She lies there instead, twitching occasionally like a slumbering animal as she coaxes Sarah’s hand through her hair over and over and over and over again.

_I’m gonna need you soon, Helena,_ Sarah says, _and you’re gonna have to be ready_.

She kisses Helena’s forehead, and Helena sinks back into dreamless sleep.

* * *

Well, no. It’s not precisely dreamless, her sleep, but images move like people behind glass, vague and uncertain. Possibly running. Possibly killing. Possibly Tomas, but that doesn’t matter.

What matters is that eventually the dream condenses, a soft white blur of lighting and murmuring voices. Helena tries to say Sarah but her tongue still will not cooperate; it lolls out of her mouth instead, and what she says is “hrm.”

_I’m still here,_ Sarah says, and also “ssh, Helena, you’re alright. It’s family.” Helena has gotten better at dreaming, because she can feel Sarah’s hands on her skin, cool and firm. They are untying the dress the hospital gave her. They move spidery against Helena’s neck; Helena wants to arch into that touch but she still _can’t_. That is so unfair that Helena wants to weep from it – Sarah has touched her so rarely, and now she is missing this.

“Mmrf,” she says (whines). She hears the huff of Sarah’s laughter. A hand runs through her hair, but it is too firm and too quick. It’s alright. Sarah has a lot less to learn than Helena does.

Then Sarah’s hands vanish and the air is cold against Helena’s skin. In the same way that she thought she should be concerned about the lights, she thinks that she should wonder why Sarah is so insistent that she no longer wear this dress.

She trusts Sarah, though, and she can’t really move anyways. Sarah knows what’s best.

( _She shot you_ , whispers a mean little voice in the back of Helena’s head, and Helena thinks _but she missed_.)

_Hey,_ Sarah says, _don’t fall asleep on me now_ , and Helena hears other voices beneath Sarah’s, distant and muffled. Who’s that, she asks, and Sarah says _Who’s what_.

But there are multiple pairs of hands on Helena’s skin, two by two, and they are putting a new dress on her. It itches; it is too tight, and she could run nowhere in it.

Why are you doing this, she asks, and Sarah says nothing back.

Sarah? she asks, suddenly afraid. Sarah?

There are still hands on her skin but the smell is wrong, all hay and soap; she remembers with a jolt of something like adrenaline that Sarah was never there in the first place, that she dreamed her.

Helena would like her mind to race but at the moment it is crippled, stumbling; she does manage to remember that a voice that wasn’t Sarah’s voice ( _stupid_ Helena, of course Sarah isn’t coming) said “family.”

Those _men_ are laying hands on her skin and she wants to tear them all off.

The zipper sings and she is rolled over onto her back; with great effort she is able to rip her eyes open.

They are standing there, silhouetted by the sun. None of them are Sarah.

“You’re awake a little early, Helena,” one of them says, and then she is not.

* * *

Her body grants her another kindness: she does not dream of Kira.

Kira is alive. Most likely. Maybe. It is Helena’s absolute dearest hope, dearer than any hope she has for herself, or Sarah, or herself-and-Sarah. She wants Kira to live. She does not want Kira anywhere near this space.

She does not dream of Kira. She does not dream of Sarah either.

She dreams that she is looking for a knife. She doesn’t know why, precisely – that sort of clarity comes from running to the edge of sleep, not this drowsiness that clings to her skin like the fabric of the dress she is wearing. This sleep is too tight. All the wrong shape. It itches.

So, no, Helena doesn’t know why she’s looking for a knife. She only knows that in her dream she needs one, and in her dream she finds one, and behold, it was very good. Its weight is firm in her hand. It feels like belonging.

She wakes when she realizes her hand is empty – her hand is empty, her heart is empty, she is all around empty. She feels like she’s moving through that jelly, swimming in a big red bowl of it. This isn’t right. This isn’t just exhaustion, this is _powerlessness_. This is not right not right not right not right not right—

Her eyes land to rest on the food, like twin (twin) flies. The food. The food did this to her and Helena’s stomach rolls over and over because she’d thought, with food, that she was safe. She’d thought that food wouldn’t hurt her, if she was safe about it – she has eaten rotten things and suffered for it, shaking and vomiting; she has eaten too much in one sitting and curled in on herself from the pain of it. Like _Sarah,_ that pain. It hurt that fiercely.

But she did not eat too much and she did not think the food was rotten. Which means it was these people, these liars. All of them liars.

Her anger is muffled under the dress-fabric of that unnatural drowsiness. She cannot force it up; she tries to move and can only stir a little.

She cannot tear her eyes away from the food. Any little thing Helena trusts turns on her.

Behind her there is a low rustling of fabric as people fill the room. Their smell rises from them in waves. It _stinks_ , carrion smell. Helena tells her body _run_ , but her body is sinking, sinking.

In a moment of weakness she wishes Sarah were here, because Sarah carried her, slumped, from the cage. Sarah let Helena lean on her. Sarah locked Tomas in a cage. Maybe if Sarah were here she would scream at these people, these liars smelling of empty mouths and full bellies, and she would lead Helena away.

Helena hears footsteps – thinks – no. Male footsteps, a heavy walker. Wearing boots. Helena’s mind is slow to get there, drowsy, an animal waking, but it is waking. She just has to bide her time and she will go free.

The man – that tall man, that _family_ man – sits on the bed and then his hands are on her and Helena wants to snarl, wants to rip his hands off and leave blood gushing from the stumps.

Instead her growl leaves her mouth as a huff and his hands are on her skin his hands are on her skin nobody _touches_ Helena, nobody except Tomas. And her family.

This man is not her family. He calls her _miracle_ , but: again it sounds like _meat_. Helena doesn’t know what they want from her, only that she does not want to give it. _Run_ , she tells her body. But the message is lost. Movement comes back to her slowly, too slow; she can shuffle upwards and see the glass eyes of the crowd, the way they are dressed in virginal white, but she cannot convince her fingers to form claws.

The man’s words wash over her like water, a baptism she did not ask for. He calls her _man’s work_ (you were born of science) ( _Sarah_ ). Lies fall from his mouth. Helena wishes each blasphemous word he spoke was a drop of blood. Drip drip drip drip drip.

_Run_ , Helena says. Her body will not run.

Then he is next to her again, and he is _holding_ her. _No!_ Helena thinks, struggles; this is not right, he should not put his hands on her, he is holding her and already her body is forgetting the feeling of Sarah holding her for _this_ , no. No no no no no. How dare he think his touch is anything like Sarah’s. How dare he put his arms where Sarah’s arms were, once. How _dare_ he!

Helena wants to kill him so desperately it burns. She bucks in his grasp and he says: _ssh_. The word falls out of his mouth wrong, a husk, and his fingers are the exact wrong thing where they move emotionlessly through her hair. She misses Sarah like a dull ache. Her breathing is a continuous low sound through her nose, the only evidence that she is trying, hard as possible, to run. In-out-in-out. Thump-thump-thump goes her heart.

His hand is on her hand. It is slippery with sweat – or possibly that is just Helena’s hand. No, she will say it is his. She wants no similarities between the two of them; this is what she thinks as a woman approaches them, wraps _ribbon_ around their hands, says things like _bound together_ and _God_.

Deep beneath her traitor skin, her traitor muscles, Helena’s heart _howls_. She wants to scream so badly that her tongue, padded as it is, can taste the need on the back of her teeth. They do not understand! They do not understand that she already _has_ a connection, strong as flesh and blood, and this puny ribbon, these false words appealing to an uncaring God, would crumble beneath it.

There is room in Helena’s heart for precisely two people, and they cannot understand that and thus this – this _marriage_ is false. False false false.

(If she thinks that it cannot be real. If she thinks that she does not have to go to Sarah – because she will go to Sarah, this is truth, she has seen it – and say: _I am sorry. They tore my veins out and threaded them with black ribbon. They have tried to forge me again in a new fire. They have broken me._

_I am_ sorry _, Sarah._

The worst part is that Sarah might not even care. She might not even understand that this, this “bound together” blasphemy, makes Helena keen with wrongness.

Sometimes Helena is afraid that she is the only person in the whole world who understands what she and Sarah have. It is so lonely, loving.)

While her thoughts have been moving in sluggish fits and starts of fear, love, pain, _family_ man has still been talking. Now he stops, and looks at her. His eyes are dead. He is smiling, and that is a dead thing too.

_I am going to kill you_ , Helena thinks, with the clarity of a razor blade, and he says “Amen.”

 They rip the ribbon from her hand and Helena is lying down again, looking at that bright ceiling. Somewhere above her is heaven; this is the only certainty she has, because she does not know where she is, and whether this is Hell.

(Maybe she died when Sarah shot her.)

(Maybe that would be a blessing.)

The flock around her bursts into applause, a continuous hollow sound. Helena tries to say _run_ again, and her body stirs enough to let her sit. Their hands slap each other over and over, a parody of violence, a mockery of celebration. Helena’s heart ricochets against her ribs. Her muscles tremble; the thudding of her heart is ripping her to pieces, tearing open her skin. There is nowhere to run. There is nowhere to go. Helena is crumbling, and Sarah is gone, and these people clap on and on and there is nowhere, nowhere to go.

She meets Grace’s eyes from across the room.

The fear in them is a mirror of Helena’s own.

**Author's Note:**

> I was a heavy heart to carry  
> My feet dragged across ground  
> And he took me to the river  
> Where he slowly let me drown
> 
> My love has concrete feet  
> My love's an iron ball  
> Wrapped around your ankles  
> Over the waterfall
> 
> I'm so heavy, heavy  
> Heavy in your arms  
> I'm so heavy, heavy  
> Heavy in your arms  
> \--"Heavy In Your Arms," Florence + the Machine


End file.
